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Niels Bohr - Banquet Speech

Niels Bohr's speech at the Nobel Banquet in
Stockholm, December 10, 1922

(Translation)

Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and
Gentlemen.

In attempting to give expression to my deep and heartfelt
gratitude for the great honour that the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences has bestowed upon me by awarding me the Nobel Prize for
Physics for this year, I am naturally forcibly reminded of Alfred
Nobel's insistence upon the international character of science,
which indeed forms the very basis of his most munificent bequest.
That point of view - the international character of science -
suggests itself all the more readily to myself, as the
contributions that I may have had the good fortune to make to the
development of physical science consist in a combination of the
results arrived at by a number of fellow-investigators, belonging
to a variety of nations, on the basis of study carried on under
widely differing scientific traditions.

The grand discoveries which scientific
experiment yielded at and about the turn of the century, in which
investigators in many countries took an eminent part and which
were destined all unexpectedly to give us a fresh insight into
the structure of atoms, were due in the first instance, as all
are aware, to the work of the great investigators of the English
school, Sir Joseph
Thomson and Sir Ernest Rutherford, who
have inscribed their names on the tablets of the history of
scientific research as distinguished witnesses to the truth that
imagination and acumen are capable of penetrating the crowded
mass of registered experience and of revealing Nature's
simplicity to our gaze. On the other hand, abstract thinking,
which throughout the ages has been one of the most powerful of
man's aids in lifting the veil that shrouds the laws of Nature
from the eyes of the uninitiated observer, has proved of the
utmost importance for enabling the insight into the structure of
atoms so obtained to be applied practically in elucidating the
properties of those elements that are immediately accessible to
our perceptions. To this branch of the work too, men of many
nations have made important contributions; but it was the great
German investigators, Planck and Einstein, who, as a result of
their systematic abstract investigations, were to show us for the
first time that the laws of the movements of atomic particles,
which determine the properties of the elements, are of an
essentially different character from those laws by the aid of
which science has hitherto sought to bring order into the mass of
our observations of natural phenomena. If it has been my good
fortune to be in some sense a connecting link at one point in the
development, that is but one among many evidences of the
fruitfulness of the closest relations prevailing in the
scientific world between those carrying on investigations under
varying human conditions. A Danish scientist, however, on finding
himself in Stockholm on such an occasion as this, cannot confine
his thoughts to the international character of science but must
also dwell in an equal degree on the intellectual solidarity that
exists in these Scandinavian countries, of which we are all -
and, especially in the domain of science - fully and perfectly
aware. It might be tempting to endeavour to indicate the great
debt owed by science, and consequently by Danish investigators,
to Swedish scientists of earlier and recent times. That, however,
would carry me too far, even if I were to confine myself only to
the most important of the contributions that we owe to the
distinguished representatives of Swedish investigations in
natural science who are present here this evening, and whose work
in a variety of ways has been of fundamental importance, for
instance, for atomic research. Hence I must rest content only to
recall the name of one single Swedish physicist, the late
Professor Rydberg of Lund, whose brilliant work on the spectral
laws has been of such great importance for extending our
knowledge of atoms and especially for the particular contribution
that it was to fall to my lot to make.

In once more gladly availing myself of this
opportunity to express my deep gratitude for the honour that the
Academy of Sciences has bestowed upon myself and upon Danish
scientific investigation by awarding me the Nobel Prize, I also
beg leave at this banquet to propose the toast of International
Cooperation for the Advancement of Science, which is, I may say,
in these so manifoldly depressing times, one of the bright spots
visible in human existence, and also to give you, in particular,
Prosperity to the sense of unity and solidarity in scientific
work among the peoples of Scandinavia who, notwithstanding the
characteristic peculiarities of each, do feel themselves
intimately bound together by the ties of racial affinity.